“It hurts,” Wheeler said. “He’s a guy that is the definition of on-fire right now. He’s played awesome for us.”

Indeed, that’s a tough loss with how legitimate Winnipeg has been looking lately.

On the bright side, Evander Kane has been on a nice run of his own, and he looks to slide into Perreault’s spot alongside Mark Scheifele and Michael Frolik.

Still, there’s only so much you can sugarcoat losing a player who scored nine points in five games before being injured on Friday, especially if Kane struggles to find chemistry alongside linemates who may be better on paper.

That’s a bummer, but the league’s contenders learn to roll with injury punches. If the Jets want to gain that distinction, they’ll have to do it too … starting with tonight’s game against the struggling Arizona Coyotes.

If you look at the box score, the story of the New York Islanders beating the Chicago Blackhawks 3-2 was all about the Isles scoring two goals in less than one minute.

The Blackhawks view it as a matter of work ethic, though.

Both Jonathan Toews and Dan Carcillo emphasized as much after the loss, which saw the end of Chicago’s eight-game winning streak. Toews praised Scott Darling, but not the team effort, as the Chicago Sun-Times’ Mark Lazerus reports.

“We just didn’t work for pucks, we didn’t generate chances, we didn’t really make them do things they didn’t want to do,” Toews said.

Carcillo echoed those thoughts:

Carcillo: "They were outworking us and putting pucks to the net & going to those hard areas. Seemed like we didn’t want to do it tonight."